Yesterday, Google began rolling out a small update to the Newsstand app, bumping it up from 3.2 to 3.2.1. While the version number suggests this was only a bug fix -and it mostly is- there were still a couple of interesting additions discovered during a teardown.

Onboarding Walkthrough

Google is adding a helpful walkthrough for people who are new to Newsstand. Until now, the app has lacked a proper "onboarding" step for the first time an app is run. There's nothing unusual here; it's just your typical setup steps with a basic explanation of Newsstand and a screen at the end prompting users to pick a few preferred topics.

It looks like this is only intended for true first-timers; there's no normal way to access it once you've run Newsstand on an account. Even clearing app data just results in your data being re-downloaded. However, it's simple enough to run the activity with ADB if you really want to see it for yourself. Just connect your phone to a computer and run this command:

Offers

Every good store finds a way to provide special offers, especially those tailored to its customers. It looks like Google is about to go the extra mile and start making offers directly from within the Newsstand app instead of keeping them siloed exclusively in the Play Store. It's still a bit unclear, but it looks like these offers might be personalized based on past reading preferences and other criteria. At the moment, there's not much to see until offer data starts streaming to the app, but it looks like everything is ready to go when Google flips the switch.

Just like the onboarding experience, it's easy to get to pull up the Offers interface with adb. Just run this command:

That's about it for this one. Since most regular readers will never see the new onboarding screens, and offers aren't actually turned on yet, this isn't going to feel like much more than a bug fix over the previous version. Google still hasn't updated the changelog on the app since 3.1 rolled out in February, so we'll keep watching it in case there is something else to share.

APK Download

The APK is signed by Google and upgrades your existing app. The cryptographic signature guarantees that the file is safe to install and was not tampered with in any way. Rather than wait for Google to push this download to your devices, which can take days, download and install it just like any other APK.

Comments

I'm not always a fan of the solid color across the whole screen like the onboarding screens above, but on this app, I love it. I was already in to the color shifting topics and parallax-like paging between topics, and somehow I'm very happy to see this little addition.

That is a matter of opinion. If you use it as an RSS reader you are gonna have a bad experience because it is not that. If you use it to read Magazines and as a news aggrigation app it is in my opinion one of the better ones out there.

Yea. And there's no iOS version either. I've been waiting for both the web and iOS version the longest. Hopefully this means they're right around the corner.

Chad

Ditto on that iOS version. Need that ASAP Google.

h4rr4r

It is a newsreader, if you need onboarding maybe you should take your phone/tablet back to the seller and get yourself an old rotary handset.

sdcoiner76

There are tons of new Android users every day and many are not anywhere in our demographic. Google especially has to make sure that they cater to as many people as they can. It is crazy but you would not believe how many older people have android phones because they can get bigger screens. I asked a couple of ladies in our store about it and it was because they can see the screen better.

I think that's the plan. It'll start here and then travel to Books, Movies & TV, and maybe even Music. There are so many people that use these apps but almost never open the Play Store, it makes sense to put offers right in front of people in the relevant apps.

NBM

they kind of mix stuff in

Martin Holla

What newsstand really lacks is a comment system!

sdcoiner76

Agreed but if they did it probably would have to be tied to the G+ comment system in order to use it.

NBM

isn't it because it's a fancy reader?
For social news feed I use G+ (replaced Flipboard for me) which is the easiest for me to keep track of/ follow...since there doesn't seem to be a Disqus app

Denis

this gotta be the "slowest app" on my phone and the only app i'm experiencing performance issues with and i have no idea why. the scrolling lag and the way images appear only when scrolled into view are really annoying.